"The Guardian" interview with Steve Sailer

Here's my lengthy dialogue with The Guardian's Portland antifa-adjacent doxxing specialist Jason Wilson.

If we had serious mainstream intellectual discourse, my anthology Noticing would be subjected to searching booking reviews by major public intellectuals, and interviews with me by bright, challenging questioners would be widely published.

Instead, center-left publications like The Guardian and The Atlantic assign intellectually lightweight reporters to write shocking exposes about how I’m no longer banned from holding a microphone.

My policy is that I only submit to interviews in which I retain the right to post the interview. Here’s The Guardian interview with Steve Sailer. It led to this pretty bad (but not totally terrible) article “Florida university to host extremist after DeSantis-led lurch to right” by Portland antifa-adjacent doxxing specialist Jason Wilson.

Not surprisingly, however, The Guardian’s interview with me is much better than The Guardian’s article about me:

Steve Sailer: I only agree to answer questions from journalists who in turn agree that I can publish or otherwise reproduce both my answers and your questions. Ali Breland and The Atlantic agreed to those terms. Do you?

Jason Wilson of The Guardian: Yes that's fine by us.

Mr Sailer,

I'm reaching out to you on assignment for The Guardian.

I wanted to offer you the opportunity to comment on some reporting I have done....

I also need to put some other reporting to you.

In Noticing, and your other work, you claim (among other things) that

• Black Americans are on average less intelligent, and more inclined to criminal behavior than whites, and that this is in large part a matter of biology.

Sailer: It's not a claim, it's an observation that African Americans average lower than Ashkenazi Jews, Asians, whites, and, usually, Hispanics (in that order) on virtually all cognitive tests. This is perhaps the most exhaustively documented finding in all of American social science. See, for example, Roth et al's 2001 meta-analysis with a sample size of over 6 million: "Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: A meta-analysis."

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-01339-002

On the other hand, that by no means proves that all African Americans score worse on cognitive tests. About 7 or 8 million African American would outscore the average white American on an IQ test, the SAT, the military's AFQT, the GRE, the MCAT, the PISA, and so forth.

As for crime, African Americans have a sizable problem with crime, especially with gun homicides among young men. The CDC tracks the causes of all deaths in the US. Its WONDER data reporting system shows that in 2023, African Americans died by homicide (usually at the hands of other African Americans) 10 times as often per capita as whites, 4 times as often as the comparably poor Hispanics, and 18 times as often as Asians. 

Among males 15-34, young black men died 21 times as often as young white men.

It's impossible to blame the African American homicide problem wholly on genetic differences because there was a huge explosion in the black-on-black murder rate in the days following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, when America's progressive establishment declared it was time for the "racial reckoning" and prudent police retreated to the donut shop. 

If genes were all that mattered, we wouldn't see tens of thousands of incremental blacks dying in homicides and traffic accidents when Black Lives Matter held the whip hand politically over the police in 2015-16 and in 2020-2021. Black deaths by homicide increased 44% from 2019 (pre-George Floyd) to 2021 (post-George Floyd), and also grew 39% due to deaths in motor vehicle accidents. When society weakens law enforcement, more blacks die. Personally, I'm against more of my fellow American citizens dying by gunshot and car crash. But that was a highly unpopular opinion when Black Lives Matter was riding high and getting a lot of black lives murdered.

In contrast to the lethal disasters of the Black Lives Matter decade, which also drove up black traffic fatalities by cutting the number of traffic stops of bad drivers, we've also seen counter-examples of strong political leadership, such as in New York City in the Giuliani, Bloomberg, and Bratton Era, help bring the black homicide rate way down by discouraging lowlifes from carrying illegal handguns. Point-of-use gun control can save a lot of black lives.

As a moderate, I tend to assume that Occam's razor suggests both nature and nurture play major roles in human affairs. In contrast, some extremists wield Occam's Butterknife to dogmatize that only genes or only social construction can possibly matter.

• Wilson: That racially liberal attitudes induce Black Americans to commit more crimes, and that Black populations need to be strictly policed.

Sailer As you'll recall, racial attitudes got much more liberal in the United States in the single week following George Floyd's death. What you probably haven't been told is that in CDC weekly cause-of-death data, we can see that young black men died much more often by both homicide and motor vehicle accident in the weeks following May 25, 2020 than in the weeks before.

• Wilson: Black men in particular are on average biologically predisposed to crime through an excess of masculine traits. 

Sailer: African Americans tend do very well in the most masculine sports, such as the NFL and NBA. You say that represents an "an excess" of masculine traits. My guess would be that most things in human life come with tradeoffs. Masculinity is very good for some things (e.g., playing cornerback in the NFL) and not as good for other things (e.g., avoiding engaging in violent crime).

• Wilson: There is a global racial hierarchy of average intelligence, and that this is supported by reliable data, including Lynn & Vanhaven's 2002 book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations.

As of 2024, there are now a half dozen different databases of international performance on cognitive exams such as IQ tests and school achievement tests such as the PISA, which is lavishly funded by the OECD.

https://substack.com/@kirkegaard/p-141253488

 For example, the World Bank maintains a database of "Harmonized Learning Outcomes" of school achievement tests in well over 100 countries. 

https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0038001

There are noteworthy differences between the six international compendiums in methodology and type of input, but, overall, they correlate quite well with each other. 

On the other hand, the results can be expected to change over time. For example, South Koreans in the 1960s tended to be short and didn't score terribly well on international tests. Two generations later, they are much taller (even taller on average than the Japanese, who have been affluent for longer) and score much better than their grandparents.

As usual, both nature and nurture seem to play a role in how the world works.

• Wilson: That Africans are on the whole more primitive than other people, and that this is a factor driving African birthrates.

Sailer: "Primitive?" Is Patrick Mahomes a primitive quarterback? Is Steph Curry a primitive point guard? Was Duke Ellington a primitive musician?

Demographers use the term "demographic transition" to denote the point at which industrializing countries see sharp drops in fertility relative to their agricultural past. African Americans are well into the "demographic transition" with total fertility rates below replacement for most of the last third of a century. Haiti is headed in that direction, as are some sub-Saharan countries. However, some sub-Saharan countries, especially in the Sahel, continue to have high fertility. As the United Nations' population projections point out, that fact is likely to have significant impact on the world in the second half of the 21st century.

• Wilson: That the Democratic Party mobilizes anti-white hatred for electoral purposes.

Sailer: The Grand Strategy of the Democratic Party is to be the Party of Diversity and thus to profit from America's increasing diversity, such as by promoting DEI affirmative action for blacks, amnesty and more open borders to increase the number of Democratic-leaning Hispanics and Asians, and sponsoring new forms of identity such as the transgender frenzy of the last decade. 

This makes much sense from a strategic standpoint (although the ethics of importing voters is debatable).

The obvious tactical problem for Democrats, however, is: What ties together the Democrats' highly diverse power blocs: the black church ladies, the Silicon Valley transgenders, the Muslim immigrants, the feminists, the Jews, the Hispanic Border Patrolmen, and so forth? What can keep the Democrats from turning into a circular firing squad of competing interests? 

So far, the most pragmatic answer the Democrats have come up with is to unite Diverse Americans around animus toward Core Americans: the more you resemble George Washington demographically, the more you are set up to be The Bad Guy in the Democrats' Not So Great Replacement. Thus, if you are a white, that's bad under the Conventional Wisdom. For example, the New York Times has become enthralled by the racist and sexist slur "Karen" and has recurrently instructed its readers in its correct usage against white women. But, if you are a white man, that's worse. If you a straight white man, even worse. A straight white cisgender man? You're the worst yet, until some other category comes along.

Wilson: Is that an accurate reflection of your thinking? If not could you please say where it's wrong and why?

Sailer: Based on what I've seen of your earlier work, I'm sure whatever you publish won't be an accurate reflection of my thinking, but instead will be out-of-context quotes at which you point-and-sputter in rage because you can't think of how to refute them.

On the other hand, your specialty is doxing people like Lomez, and I've published everything under my own name for the last third of a century.

Instead of treating my existence as a scandal to be deplored, why doesn't the Guardian commission a leading public intellectual such as, say, Anthony Appiah or Richard Dawkins to review my anthology Noticing?

https://www.amazon.com/Noticing-Essential-1973-2023-Steve-Sailer-ebook/dp/B0D4NH16DL/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.lcSYC6lJbWylmn6GiGA6Tw.OpqtMlcDXt6cz9T_5jf-dofy5_tF7WDOLta_gdAeWMQ&qid=1716435591&sr=8-1

Wilson: Also, I need to ask you about some things others have said.

I've spoken to several scientists, including experts in evolutionary biology and population genetics, who also say your views on race, intelligence, and crime are at odds with current scientific understandings of genetics and population biology. In particular, they tell me that sociopolitical categories of race (Black, white, Hispanic etc) do not map onto human genetic variation.

They tell me that the prevailing consensus is best represented in documents such as the report published by the National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine last year.  https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/26902/chapter/1

A key quote from that document is "In humans, race is a socially constructed designation, a misleading and harmful surrogate for population genetic differences, and has a long history of being incorrectly identified as the major genetic reason for phenotypic differences between groups.”

Do you have any response to that?

Sailer: I would strongly encourage people sincerely interested in finding out what is the state of the art in the human sciences to look to the best scientists of our age rather than to the mediocrities and committeemen who flee into Science Denialism lest they be canceled for crimethink.

As an example of a scientist who is so hugely accomplished that he doesn't worry much about being canceled by the Science Denialist know-nothings, Harvard's superstar geneticist David Reich has had important things to say about the reality of race. A good place to start is Reich’s March 23, 2018 op-ed in the New York Times, "How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html

I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades. These advances enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.

Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases. For example, we now know that genetic factors help explain why northern Europeans are taller on average than southern Europeans, why multiple sclerosis is more common in European-Americans than in African-Americans, and why the reverse is true for end-stage kidney disease.

I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. 

I strongly recommend Reich’s 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here, which I wrote three reviews of:

https://www.takimag.com/article/reichs_laboratory_steve_sailer/

https://www.takimag.com/article/a_pair_of_giants_steve_sailer/

https://www.takimag.com/article/ghosts_of_africa_steve_sailer/

And there's the hilarious climax of Fleet Street journalist Angela Saini's interview with Reich in her book Superior in which she attempts to vindicate the current Conventional Wisdom that Race Does Not Exist. Reich demolishes the premise of her book, leaving her sputtering at the end.

From my 2019 review:

https://www.takimag.com/article/arguing-against-reality/

Saini also goes to interview David Reich, who runs the world’s most productive lab for sequencing ancient DNA. ... But then Reich goes on to blaspheme against her race-is-just-a-social-construct creed:

At the same time [Reich] thinks some categories may have more biological meaning to them. Black Americans are mostly West African in ancestry and white Americans tend to be European, both correlating to genuine population groups that were once separated at least partially for seventy thousand years in human history….

He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones, because before they arrived in the United States, these population groups had this seventy thousand years apart during which they adapted to their own different environments.

Reich implies that natural selection may have acted on them differently within this timescale to produce changes that go further than skin deep. He adds, judiciously, that he doesn’t think these differences will be large—only a fraction as big as the variation between individuals, just as biologist Richard Lewontin estimated in 1972. But he doesn’t expect them to be nonexistent either: as individuals we are so very different from one another that even a fraction of a difference between groups is something.

The scientist’s sacrilege causes the scandalized journalist to harrumph:

They are words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream geneticist.

Wilson: Meanwhile, Richard Lynn's work on hierarchies of intelligence is widely seen as discredited. For example, several papers have been retracted on the basis of using the data,

Sailer: Lynn's overall findings have been repeatedly replicated. In his elderly years, the late Lynn was not the most meticulous compiler of data, but the general patterns of his quick and dirty findings of 2002 have been repeatedly replicated in more recent decades. See, for example, the World Bank's Harmonized Learning Outcome database, which I summarize here:

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/replicating-richard-lynns-iq-and

The World Bank reports that the country with the highest school achievement scores on international tests is Singapore at 575, followed by Macau, Hong Kong, and Estonia, the highest scoring country outside of East Asia. 

The lowest scorer at 305, about 2.7 standard deviations lower than Singapore, is Niger. Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria also do badly. The lowest scoring country not in sub-Saharan Africa is Yemen. 

Wilson: and European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association issued a blanket condemnation of the data in 2020, writing that "conclusions drawn from these data are both untenable, and likely to give rise to racist conclusions."

Sailer: Crimethink! Burn the heretics!

Obviously, a lot of people are terrified of having their careers ruined by witch hunters. So they make up stuff to persuade you to focus on braver individuals.

Wilson: Any thoughts on that? 

Sailer: Any thoughts on why you signed up for the Auxiliary Thought Police? Have you always enjoyed being a bully? 

Wilson: More generally, your work has been described as racist and as pseudoscience by writers across the political spectrum, including in conservative publications like National Review, while you yourself appear to object to being described as a "white supremacist". 

How would you describe your own political position on race? 

Sailer: As a thinker, I try to be realistic about everything. 

When I was 9-years-old in October 1968, I saw my first college football game: #1 USC vs. #13 Oregon State at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Both teams had All-American running backs.

 In the first half, Oregon St.’s 250 pound white tailback Steve Enyart pounded into the USC line with his massive upper body strength. But in the second half, the speed of the Trojan tailback overwhelmed the Ducks defense, as he rushed for a career high 238 yard and USC’s 17-13 victory. 

That superstar was named, of course, O. J. Simpson.

You may have heard of him.

In the 56 years since, I’ve assumed that African-Americans tend to be faster on average than white-Americans. I don’t see much reason to believe this is due to blacks training harder at sprinting than whites. My impression is that a whole lot of Americans, white and black, like football and want to succeed at it.

Americans watch an enormous amount of football on TV. The black-white running speed gap is evident every weekend. Has this led to apocalyptic white-on-black race riots? Are white Americans driven insane with vicious rage that they don’t appear to be as innately fast, on average, as black Americans?

Nah. 

Even though Americans care a huge amount about sports, we appear to be okay with clear-cut racial differences in running ability.

The assumption by white progressive intellectuals that evidence for intellectual gaps between races on average would automatically lead to Nazi-like genocidal urges strikes me as more telling about the craziness of white progressive intellectuals. 

In contrast, most American sports fans are okay with racial differences in sports talents.

As for my policy views, they are quite moderate. 

For example, while I admire the Supreme Court's idealism in banning affirmative action in college admissions last year, I fear that the Justices are naively ill-informed about just how large are the cognitive performance gaps in contemporary America between Asian-Americans and African-Americans. For example, MIT's freshman class would probably not be more than one percent black under pure meritocratic admissions.Obviously, MIT making blacks 15% of its 2023 freshman class, the last before the Supreme Court decision, was absurd. But one percent under a colorblind system sounds harsh. 

So, MIT's decision in 2024 to cut back on its black quota but still use enough affirmative action so that its black share fell from 15% to 5% rather than 1% strikes me as a reasonable compromise.

Wilson: Was the Human Biodiversity Foundation was a formally constituted nonprofit?

Sailer: No. The Human Biodiversity Foundation never existed except in an aspirational sense. It seemed like a good idea at the time c. 1999. When I discovered c. 2000 how much paperwork would be involved in starting a not-for-profit, I realized I'd never get around to it.

Amusingly, ever since the non-existent Human Biodiversity Foundation has carried on a ghost existence in the allegations of various leftist hate organizations who fundraise in part by making me sound much scarier and more well-organized than I am.